Smartphones | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

A gigabit milestone for mobile networks

The rollout of Telstra’s gigabit 4G network is another step on way to the next generation of connected devices.

Yesterday communications vendors Qualcomm, Netgear, Ericsson and Telstra, unveiled their Australian gigabit LTE service that gives users high speed internet connections over the 4G mobile network.

Billed as a world’s first, Telstra will offer customers the Netgear supplied hotspots that can connect up to twenty devices over WiFi.

Listening to the Telstra spiel yesterday, it wasn’t hard to conclude the company is making a pitch for the market frustrated by the National Broadband Network’s tardy rollout and patchy service.

The service doesn’t come cheap though, as Finder’s Alex Kidman points out, an hour’s movie streaming on one device could easily cost $4500 dollars on Telstra’s current plans with one of the company’s executives emphasising the product is “aimed at the premium end of the market.”

Being aimed at the premium end of the market is shame for Qualcomm as their spokespeople were keen to show off the gaming, AR and VR potential of the Snapdragon CPUs driving these devices. It would be a brave or very affluent family that bought one of these devices for their kids given the data costs.

While the Telstra Gigabit LTE service might be an NBN replacement for deep pocketed customers, telco veteran John Lindsay points out the mobile network can’t support too many people doing so unless many more cells are deployed.

For the moment the Telstra service is going to be attractive for companies needing high speed. low volume connections in the central business district and as the gigabit LTE upgrades roll out across the country, it will be useful for travellers as well as frustrated NBN customers.

Ultimately the gigabit LTE product is another step toward the 5G networks that we’ll be seeing appear at the end of the decade, something that both the Ericsson and Telstra PR folk were keen to highlight.

The key message for consumers and businesses is the rate of innovation in the mobile communications market is not slowing and another generation of connected devices is coming that will change things as dramatically as the smartphone did.

Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

It’s not easy to design a safe and affordable portable device as Samsung found with the exploding Note7

One of the most humiliating corporate crises of recent history has to be last year’s recall of the Galaxy Note.

Airlines around the world started telling passengers that the devices were banned during their pre flight briefings, causing untold damage for the Samsung brand.

Now Samsung have completed a review into what happened including an infographic illustrating the exact problem with the batteries.

That review shows the design and manufacturing errors that resulted in the batteries bursting into flames. How Samsung are fixing it or putting in systems to prevent that happening again isn’t discussed.

What the infographic does show is how complex the design, engineering and manufacturing is in modern technology – something that is often overlooked by many technologists.

Battery technologies are particularly fraught as a lot of energy is compressed into a small space and the chemistry of Lithium Ion batteries makes them particularly dangerous should they be damaged or incorrectly used, as Boeing found with the early models of the 787 Dreamliner.

Modern life and the devices that we take for granted are complex and that complexity though can easily come back to bite us. As Samsungs’ exploding batteries show, sometimes that complexity is difficult to manage.

Google’s grab for the smartphone market

Google’s Pixel smartphone is part of the company’s bid to exert greater control over the smartphone market.

This week Google released its latest smartphone, the Pixel, to mixed reviews. Controlling the most popular mobile operating system, Android, isn’t enough for the company.

As Microsoft found, just supplying the operating systems for smartphones isn’t enough to influence the market. Apple, along with Nokia and Blackberry before them, showed that the path to both controlling the segment and being profitable relies on having devices designed for their software.

Given the Pixel’s price point, it’s unclear how well it will do against the iPhone, Samsung’s models or the plethora of Chinese devices but for all the Android ecosystem’s players, having its controlling owner running in opposition to them can’t be comforting.

Again though Microsoft’s experience is instructive, and encouraging, for the broader Android community as Microsoft’s attempts to push out Windows CE devices failed dismally. For Google to be successful where Microsoft failed would require a degree of corporate discipline the search engine giant is not renown for.

In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft strength was licensing and controlling access to the operating system. Android’s strength in the smartphone world is that Google doesn’t have the same veto power. To be able to exercise control over the market, Google needs a big device share.

Ultimately though the success of the Google Pixel smartphone will depend on how many users will adopt it. It may be time for another round of smartphone subsidy wars.

Google scraps Project Ara

As predicted it seems Google’s Project Ara is about to be another victim of the company’s attention deficit disorder.

Project Ara, Google’s experimental modular phone, seems to be doomed reports Reuters.

Sadly this isn’t surprising as the indications of Ara’s demise have been around for a year.

In some ways this isn’t surprising as Google retreated from the smartphone market at the beginning of 2014 with its sale of the Motorola handset business, the company’s notorious attention deficit disorder wouldn’t have helped the project’s survival chances either.

Should Reuter’s report be true, then Google’s management will have shown again that the company isn’t prepared to stick with long term research projects and that journalists, not to mention researchers and developers, need to treat the company’s programs with some scepticism.

For the Ara team, they’ve no doubt learned a lot in developing this project and it will be interesting to see how that knowledge is applied to other products, few of which will belong to Google.

Smartphones become a mature market

The smartphone market has matured, which brings a range of challenges for manufacturers.

As Apple celebrates shipping a billion iPhones, the smartphone industry has entered maturity reports IDC.

The analyst firm’s latest survey of the global smartphone industry reports only 0.3% growth over the equivalent period of last year.

While both Apple and Samsung have had successes over the past year with new models, IDC believes growth now lies in shifting ‘flagship products’ at lower price points with enhanced features.

A more mature industry opens opportunities for the cheaper Chinese brands and IDC is finding those companies are unsurprisingly proving successful in emerging markets. For the established brands redefining their price points and models is going to be the challenge.

That mature marketplace is going to focus the minds of product managers, marketers and executives at all the manufacturers as capturing profit and investors’ imaginations in a mature market is very different to that when selling a new, high growth product.

Building the internet of rice cookers

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi hopes an Internet of Things ecosystem can drive the company’s growth

Are domestic appliances the next wave of connected devices? Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi hopes so.

Xiaomi is best known for its cheap smartphones aimed at third world markets and the company’s move into connected kitchen devices marks an expansion into broader areas.

Smartphones being the centre of Xiaomi’s product offerings seems to be the common factor in the expanded range of devices, with the company hoping their ecosystem will be a compelling point of difference in a crowded market.

The idea the smartphone will be the centre of people’s connected lifestyles isn’t new but Xiaomi’s bet on low margin home appliances to drive smartphone sales and subscriptions to cloud services seems a brave move.

It may work however, the business models of tomorrow look improbable today.

BlackBerry’s last smartphone

The BlackBerry Priv is probably the company’s last smartphone as it pivots to being a security provider

Having written about BlackBerry’s ambitions in the marketplace for The Australian last week, it wasn’t surprising to be invited to the company’s Down Under launch of their Priv handset earlier today.

The event illustrated some brutal realities about mobile phone market and BlackBerry’s efforts to build on its strengths in the enterprise security space.

With 2.7 billion dollars of cash reserves, the company has seven years of breathing space at its current loss rates although it’s notable the stock market values the company at $3.5bn, implying investors value the business’ operations at a measly $800 million.

Given the collapse in BlackBerry’s handset business from twenty percent of the market at the beginning of the decade to an asterix today, that pessimism from investors isn’t surprising and underscores why the company is recasting itself as an enterprise security provider.

Five major acquisitions in the last 18 months have demonstrated how BlackBerry is attempting to recast its business; security services like Good Technology and Secusmart through to warning software like At Hoc have seen the company bolster its range of offerings.

Coupled with the recent acquisitions are its own longstanding messaging and secure communications services combined with the QNX software arm that promises a far more reliable Internet of Things than many of the current operating systems being embedded into smart devices.

The Android smartphone system itself is bedevilled with dangerous apps running on outdated software and where BlackBerry hopes their PRIV handset can attract enterprise users conscious of the need to secure their employees’ devices.

For BlackBerry though, the PRIV being shipped with the Android operating system is a capitulation to the smartphone market’s stark reality where there is only demand for two products and outside players like BlackBerry or Windows are destined to wither away.

While the PRIV is a nice, albeit expensive, phone and the slide out physical keyboard is nice to use, the device seems to be a desperate attempt by the company to stay in the smartphone market.

As an outside observer it’s hard to see the justification for BlackBerry continuing as a phone manufacturer, there may be some intellectual property value from the development of the devices – although it should be noted the company only valued its IP assets at $906 million in November 2015.

While the PRIV is a perfectly good Android phone it will probably be the last smartphone BlackBerry makes, the challenge for the company’s management now is to tie together the software assets it has into a compelling suite of products for the enterprise sector.

In an age where devices of all types are going to be connected, the market for ensuring their security should be huge. Catering to that market should be BlackBerry’s greatest hope of survival.

The tough way to make a smartphone dollar

Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC’s problems show the dominance Apple has of the market

Times are getting even tougher for Apple’s competitors with Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC falling out of Taiwan’s main stock market index after their share price fell 66% over the last year.

Coupled with reports that Korea’s Samsung is laying off ten percent of their workforce, it’s clear the smartphone industry is by no means a license to print money.

Making matters worse for the sector, Apple will be announcing a refresh tomorrow morning which will almost certainly hurt the competition further.

For the marketplace, particularly as one as important as the smartphone market, having only one profitable supplier is not a good thing. The challenge though is for Apple’s competitors to find a way to make a profit.

Samsung pins its hopes on the Internet of Things

Samsung’s launch of a Smart Things home hub is a step forward for the company looking to pivot from the smartphone market

South Korean industrial giant Samsung is struggling, in the last year its smartphone division reported a 75% drop in revenues while their handsets, while still the world’s most popular, lost ten percentage points of market share.

The company’s smartphone division is stuck because mobile carriers in the western world are abandoning subsidies for handsets, with most developed markets now at saturation point for cellphone adoption there’s little point in chasing market growth for all but the most desperate telco.

For Samsung that’s been a problem as their premium model strategy has been based upon western consumers ordering a new phone every 18 to 24 months as their mobile contracts were renewed, now those deals are not so common a key sales channel for the Korean conglomerate has been lost.

This leaves Samsung looking for the next market and at this week’s IFA consumer technology event in Berlin, the company unveiled its Smart Things hub, a cylindrical device that connects with your TV, air conditioning, music system, and other home appliances.

Smart Things was an acquisition Samsung made last year to improve its IoT product line and the company has an open platform for connecting household devices with over 200 already certified.

For Samsung with its range of domestic equipment this may well mark the future for the business. The interesting thing though is the smartphone is still integral in today’s vision of the connected home, so we won’t see Samsung leaving the handset market soon.

Project Ara starts looking lonely

It may be Google’s Project Ara is about to become the latest victim of the company’s attention deficit disorder.

Two years ago this site interviewed New Deal Design’s Gadi Amit about Google’s Project Ara.

Project Ara is an experiment in creating a modular phone where users can customise their devices by adding or removing components.

PC World now reports the mooted soft launch for the Project Ara phone in Puerto Rico has been cancelled.

While Google aren’t saying the project has been shut down, the sporadic and cryptic messages around Ara don’t bode well given the way the company loses interest in and then abandons products.

If it is being abandoned, it will be interesting to see where the intellectual property from the project ends up.

Google’s Android problems point the way for the Internet of Things

How Google handle ongoing Android security issues will be a pointer for protecting the Internet of Things

As regular security problems are being exposed in the Android operating system, Google and Samsung have announced regular updates to their devices and software.

For long timers in the IT industry this is a return to the Microsoft days of Patch Tuesdays, the monthly bundle of updates for Windows and Office the company used to issue on the first Tuesday of each month.

While Android has nothing the like the problems Microsoft did in the early 2000s with the explosion of malware that crippled millions of users, the risks to the Google system are real with some predicting a security armageddon.

For users, there’s a serious question in the problems facing Android system in that unlike the Windows systems the rollout of updates is controlled by the telcos or handset vendors rather than the software developers.

As a consequence many older devices simply aren’t being updated leaving millions of smartphone users exposed to malware and having no way of fixing known security problems.

The problems facing Android are common across the entire Internet of Things, how Google respond the current smartphone security problems is going to be a pointer for the rest of the IoT sector.

Marketing and the Internet of Things

We’re only just beginning to understand the marketing potential of the Internet of Things says Bosch’s Jim Fish

“There is no perfect product,” says Jim Fish, “but the Internet of Things makes it possible to deliver a close to perfect message.”

Fish, the Chief Innovation Officer & VP Global Automotive Diagnostics at Bosch North America, was speaking to Decoding the New Economy ahead of his visit to Sydney to speak at the 2015 ADMA Global Forum.

For marketers, the connected car and the Internet of Things presents a unique set of opportunities, particularly when overlaid with today’s social media tools.

“If you think about your ability to message with today’s Facebook and the ability for marketers to micro-target messages so you could push a message to people according to things they’ve shown preference for or things that they have liked.”

“The next leap frog ahead from an automotive perspective is in vehicle advertising specific to vehicle and location,” says Fish. “There is a battle for the real estate in vehicle’s infotainment systems. The automakers are placing a lot of effort in delivering the experience the mobile user desires.”

In the auto industry this has seen a battle between software vendors to stake a position on the smartcar’s dashboard. Fish sees Google with its mapping, search and advertising technologies as being the best placed in that field but doesn’t think there will be one single winner in the automobile space.

Smart Connected Living

One of the biggest opportunities beyond marketi Fish sees is in combining the smarthome with the connected car. “We see this exploding,” he says of Bosch’s future plans. “We see it as perfectly integrating,”

Fish sees how the connected home integrates with other technologies to provide seamless connectivity for people. Even if people lose their smartphones the smart house will be able to inform and communicate with them.

Again, combining the information gathered by social media and other services presents opportunities for businesses and governments.

Networking the smart city

For the smart city, Fish sees connected cars providing a key part in managing and planning the towns of the future citing how the Michigan Department of Transportation sees how equipping vehicles with road monitoring sensors could save the state 11 million dollars a year in inspection costs.

Fish also cites how cities are experimenting with monitoring how taxis and public vehicles are using their windshield wipers to determine weather conditions. The US Department of Transportation flags the smartcar as the mobile weather station.

Again Fish sees Google as having an advantage in applying these technologies with their acquisition of Israeli traffic crowdsourcing service Wayze.

“Crowdsourcing is in its infancy. There are many things computers can do but there are some things they will never be able to do. There are some human elements still required.”

Fish sees much of our understanding of what we can do with the internet of things and the data we generate from it as being in its infancy. The real value lies in extracting the value from it. For marketers the journey is only just beginning.